Track Initiation
Track initiation is the process of creating a new radar track from an unassociated radar plot. When the tracker is first switched on, all the initial radar plots are used to create new tracks, but once the tracker is running, only those plots that couldn't be used to update an existing track are used to spawn new tracks. Typically a new track is given the status of tentative until plots from subsequent radar updates have been successfully associated with the new track. Tentative tracks are not shown to the operator and so they provide a means of preventing false tracks from appearing on the screen - at the expense of some delay in the first reporting of a track. Once several updates have been received, the track is confirmed and displayed to the operator. The most common criterion for promoting a tentative track to a confirmed track is the "M-of-N rule", which states that during the last N radar updates, at least M plots must have been associated with the tentative track - with M=3 and N=5 being typical values. More sophisticated approaches may use a statistical approach in which a track becomes confirmed when, for instance, its covariance matrix falls to a given size.
Read more about this topic: Radar Tracker
Famous quotes containing the words track and/or initiation:
“To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Until the end of the Middle Ages, and in many cases afterwards too, in order to obtain initiation in a trade of any sort whatever—whether that of courtier, soldier, administrator, merchant or workman—a boy did not amass the knowledge necessary to ply that trade before entering it, but threw himself into it; he then acquired the necessary knowledge.”
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)